Hats, Also Love
by KChasm
Summary: Falling in love, it turned out, was harder on the feet. :30 Days of Writing, prompt: beginning:


So there was this Persona 4 fic request thing I used to visit a whole bunch a while back. Two prompts that never got answered: 1) Souji/Chie, love at first sight, 2) Souji, rather than the social master he's usually portrayed as—well, he's just this guy, you know? Although, somewhere along the line "just this guy" devolved into "utter dork".

Persona 4 is Atlus; I am not Atlus.

* * *

Love hit him rather like a train with a rocket engine on one end and very large teeth on the other. It thrashed him, trashed him, crushed him, mangled him, and swept back and forth over the entire rotten mess that remained in a responsible effort to ensure that even the most fiddly bits were mashed up good and proper.

Souji stood at the front of the classroom and tried to pretend he hadn't noticed.

Making friends was difficult for a teenager in his position. It was a very awkward position, with one leg turned slightly askew, but one which he found necessary. He'd tripped on a hat under a brick while walking to school that morning, and between social standing and physically standing the latter was beginning to seem much more relevant. It had been a very clever trick, he considered. Anyone hoping for a quick laugh could put a brick under a hat and wait for the results. It took real mastery to put a hat under a brick and catch people just the same.

Similarly, making friends was difficult for a teenager in his situation. His parents had very important, very high-paying jobs, but these jobs necessitated (and he never could escape necessitation, could he?) the frequent packing up of everything and the unpacking of it in a different place altogether. It also necessitated the ability to hold off on punching one's boss in the face for making them pack and unpack everything all the time, but this, he father had confided in him, winking merrily, was a secret. When winking merrily had failed to elicit the proper reaction from Souji, the man had tapped the side of his nose knowingly. When this, too, had failed, he had tried both at the same time, and ended up plunging his finger knuckle-deep into his right nostril.

The dinner party had ended rather abruptly after that, which was fortunate because nobody had actually wanted to be there. Still, Souji had learned an important lesson from this: namely, not to confide things in anybody. The risk of a punctured nasal cavity was far too great. He accomplished this remarkable lack of secrecy by running full tilt in the opposite direction and familiarizing himself with the concept of full disclosure upon request, which perhaps went some way to explain why he found it difficult to make friends.

But possibilities aside, the problem remained. Souji was not what could be termed a social butterfly. He couldn't even regard himself a social caterpillar. At one point he had considered abandoning the animal kingdom altogether and proclaiming himself a social fungus, but even those usually found themselves attached to something.

And now he was in love.

It was an unexpected development, rather as if someone had stripped away his training wheels mid-ride, and then set him on fire.

The short-haired girl grinned as he took the chair next to hers. "Sorry," she said, in something that had probably been a whisper before enthusiasm had broken its door down, grabbed it by the shoulders, and dragged it into the sunlight kicking. "Just your luck you got Morooka, huh? Good thing it's only a year."

Souji blinked, smiled, and tried desperately to determine if any of those sentences required a response. "Uh," he attempted. This seemed well-received, so he tentatively followed it up with, "Oh."

"Yeah," said the short-haired girl, who seemed to take his response as something other than the nervous bumbling of a boy who'd just had his entire world turned upside down and shaken a few times for good measure in the space of a single sentence. Her eyes flickered downwards. "You didn't hurt your leg, did you? It looked like you were limping a whole bunch when you came in."

Finally, a question he could answer! "I kicked a brick," he said.

The short-haired girl blinked, then blinked a few more times, then seemed to realize that neither biology nor physics were in her favor and rather than trying to clear her earways with her eyelids retroactively she would be better served by voicing the obvious. "Well, why would you kick a brick?" she asked.

Souji shrugged helplessly. "It had a hat under it."


End file.
